A warm testament to the unusual joy of solitude
Have you ever dreamt about becoming a hermit? I have. There’s something bewitching about the idea of fleeing the noise of the outside world for a life of quiet reflection. In March, when we were ordered to remain indoors and avoid seeing anyone, part of me was secretly pleased. I hunkered down, grew a long beard, and split my time between reading old books and making soup.
I’m not alone in feeling this way. “Ever since I was a child, I’ve quite enjoyed being on my own,” says historian Thomas Dixon. His marvellous new series A Short History of Solitude (Radio 4, Monday) covers a great deal of ground with a light touch, and some inventive sound-design. The first episode, set to atmospheric chanting, looked at anchorites and other religious recluses, with detours to discuss the invention of the corridor and David Blaine’s 2003 stunt when he spent 44 days without food, suspended in a glass box.
Blaine looks lazy compared to Simeon the Stylite, who spent 37 years atop a pillar outside Aleppo in the fourth century. The voices of more recent hermits, “walled up in the BBC archives”, were alternately touching and bizarre.
I laughed out loud at an archive interview with a man who had spent 30 years living alone in a cell beside a church in York. The interviewer was all cut-glass hauteur; the interviewee had the voice of a muppet that’s shrunk in the wash. Why did he choose this life? “Well, I don’t know that I’ve chosen it. I’ve been sort of, er, drafted into it.” If he had his time over, would he do it again? “Oh no, I don’t suppose I should.” Would he recommend it?” “Certainly not.”
Dixon presented the whole thing with a dry sense of humour. “Digging our own grave while walled up in a cell,” he observed, “is not something most of us are ever going to do.” He was aghast when one recluse confessed to enjoying the wireless. “Listening to the radio? Isn’t that cheating?” With shows this entertaining for company, who can blame them?
If this was warm, quirky, human programme-making, In Business: The March of Robots (Radio 4, Thursday) was documentary-by-numbers. Lured in by its exciting title, I was a little disappointed to find a broad, sensible discussion of automation and technology in industry. It’s inevitable that machines will replace certain jobs: should this be welcomed, or feared? Interviewees offered unimaginative insights like: “In my experience, you’ve always got to be balanced.”
The most interesting part involved the growing use of “chatbots” – seen, for instance, in those “can I help?” windows that sometimes pop up when you visit a website. We learnt about “Turing competitions” for chatbots. “There was actually a breakthrough a few years ago,” an expert explained, “when one chatbot managed to convince 30 per cent of human judges of it being a person. But it did so by pretending to be a 13-year-old Russian orphan boy speaking English as his second language, with no understanding of English culture.”
I suppose the digi-orphan could be a breakthrough for the customer service industry, but for now much of the clothing business is still relying on real, flesh-and-blood 13-year-old orphans. The “sewbots” which might one day replace exploited sweatshop workers can’t yet handle anything much more complex than a T-shirt.
If you told me that The Lie (Radio 4, Saturday) was written and performed by robots, I’d believe you. Some sample dialogue: “I do enjoy things so much.” “Haha! I love talking nonsense. Don’t you?” “It must be dreadful when one’s legs don’t move properly. I am so glad I’m not old.”
On paper, it sounded promising – a lost drama by the most successful female playwright in West End history! Who could refuse? It’s easy to forget the extent of Agatha Christie’s career as a dramatist. It wasn’t just The Mousetrap. She remains the only woman to have had three plays running in the West End at the same time. Some of her scripts are far removed from the murder mysteries that made her name: I’d like to one day hear a radio production of Akhnaton, her ancient Egyptian epic.
Instead we got The Lie, her “first full-length original stage play”, written in her thirties and discovered among her papers in 2014. Believed to be inspired by the breakdown of her marriage, it was a 10-minute tale of infidelity stretched out to 90 stilted, predictable and unlistenably dull minutes. It’s not the cast’s fault, so I won’t drag their names into this. Bigger names – Harriet Walter, Toby Jones – are appearing elsewhere in Radio 4’s new Christie season, in adaptations of the romantic novels she wrote under the pen-name Mary Westmacott. I can see why they avoided this one.